Teaching Poetry

Lit Instructorby William Stafford

Day after day up there beating my wings
with all the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,

And they credit fact, force, battering. I dance my way toward the family of knowing,embracing stray error as a long-lost boyand bringing him home with my fluttering.

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;it bites like a saw into white pine.I communicate right; but explain to the dean—well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

from http://www.newsfromnowhere.com/stafford/stafford00.html accessed 7 August 209

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"I've always believed in the Keirkegaardian notion that education, real education, begins when the teacher learns from the students, when there's a reciprocity." ~Theodore Roethke 

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Recommended Reading:

In this updated version of her landmark book Learning to Listen, Learning to

Teach , celebrated adult educator Jane Vella revisits her twelve principles of dialogue education with a new theoretical perspective gleaned from the discipline of quantum physics. Vella sees the path to learning as a holistic, integrated, spiritual, and energetic process. She uses engaging, personal stories of her work in a variety of adult learning settings, in different countries and with different educational purposes, to show readers how to utilize the twelve principles in their own practice with any type of adult learner, anywhere.

On Teaching and Learning takes the ideas explored in renowned educator Jane Vella’s best-selling book Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach to the next level and explores how dialogue education has been applied in educational settings around the world. Throughout the book, she shows how to put the principles and practices of dialogue education into action and uses illustrative stories and examples from her extensive travels. Dialogue education values inquiry, integrity, and commitment to equity—values that are also central to democracy. Learners are treated as beings worthy of respect, recognized for the knowledge and experience they bring to the learning experience. Dialogue education emphasizes the importance of safety and belonging. It is an approach that welcomes one’s certainties and one’s questions.

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When a person encounters another person in total immediacy, he or she may also experience a glimpse of God. ~Martin Buber

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September 1, 1939

by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
– W. H. Auden

from http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15545 accessed 7 August 2009

Coffee at Home

One of my favorite poets, William Stafford, wrote a poem called "A Day at Home". Here it is:

A Day at Home
by William Stafford

On the near pine rain hangs
the way I suppose it hangs
on the far.

Being yourself, you are always
on time - right where your kind
of person should be.

Why not wait here while the rest
of the world happens? It is better as
history than it is as news.

The dog, his head on the coffee table,
gazes tranquilly, resting his chin
on a volume of Martin Buber.


I especially like the rhetorical question - "Why not wait here while the rest/of the world happens?" and then what seems like an offhand remark: "It is better as/history than it is as news." And perhaps it is meant to be taken as a casual, offhand remark. Off course, in poetry, what seems like an offhand remark makes our ears perk up.

If you are willing to wait "while the rest of the world happens", consider what that reveals about you. It means you are willing to take yourself out of the picture, so to speak. It means that you are willing to consider whether the world is better as history or as news.

The rhetorical question and the offhand remark constitute nothing less than an invitation to an intellectual discussion. But there's more: the last stanza illustrates animal nature at ease with profundities such as those available in the writings of Martin Buber (1878 - 1965), a Jew so highly respected that the Nazis did not kill him - a fact that becomes especially interesting when you consider that Buber was known for his "philosophical dialogue". He believed in an apolitical Zionism. Even more, he believed in Hasidism.

I prefer here to focus on Stafford's poetics rather than on issues we may or may not be able to find in Stafford's poems. Consider, in contrast to the hospitality of "A Day at Home", the fiercely private posturing in the often-anthologized "Ask Me":

Ask Me
by William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

What seems at first an entirely cold facade turns out to be a very nice (i.e., thoughtful and engaging) way of saying "wait and see".

In the spirit of hospitality, I offer the reader the following poem by Derek Walcott and also a series of pictures I took at home the other day.

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

"It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued."
River Junction Poets Mission Statement

Recommended Reading: One Poet's Notes

In case you missed it, Edward Byrne of the Valparaiso Poetry Review has recently posted, at his One Poet's Notes blog, about

• the life, poetry and recent death of W.D. Snodgrass
• the poetry of William Stafford (one of my favorite poets)
• Edgar Allan Poe's writing
• Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, including Barack Obama's comments on that address as the time was nearing for Obama to give his own inaugural address
• Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day".

As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Byrne is swinging for the fence and batting 1000. Take a few minutes to take in these essays. You'll be glad you did.

Three Poems

Two poems that are not great but are nevertheless worth considering.

County Fair by Charles Simic

If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

From Hotel Insomnia, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved.

It seems a simple poem at first. I laughed out loud when I read it the first time and then again when I read it to a few friends. A six-legged dog at a county fair lays around most of the time. For the speaker, the dog seems to be about as interesting as the fact that it's “a cold, dark night/To be out at the fair.” When the dog's keeper throws a stick and the dog fetches it, the poem gets even more interesting.

First of all, the speaker of the poem is acting as witness and more. I didn't see this at first because the importance of the dog is downplayed (in line two) and because the “we” of the poem is never clarified. But the speaker is more than a witness when making the assertion “One got used to them quickly.” How would the speaker know how quickly you or I might get used to the dog's extra legs? It's an interesting assertion. It almost seems to me an allusion to the part toward the end of The Stranger by Albert Camus in which the narrator talks about how a man could get used to anything, even to living in the trunk of a tree. But one reason I remember “County Fair” as well as I do is because of the extra legs and the hilarity of the speaker's matter-of-fact description of them without being judgmental about the keeper's intent to hoodwink people in order to separate them from their money (Why else would there be a six-legged dog at a county fair?). So to me it's interesting that the six legs are treated so casually in the poem because it is those six legs that for me make the poem memorable.

The addition of the drunken girl's laughter and the drunken man's persistent kissing increase the value of the poem. The two of them get three of the poem's sixteen lines, which doesn't seem like much, but if we take them out of the poem, we lose the idea that the speaker knows of the humor in the dog keeper's attempt at deception by adding a pair of phony legs to her dog. We also lose the idea that the speaker of the poem is aware of people doing what they want without regard to what others are doing or thinking around them.

The last line adds still another dimension. Are the girl and man part of “the whole show”? Is the speaker aware of the unclear meaning of the last line? Finally, we are left with the dog standing there with the stick in its mouth, looking “back at us.” Maybe the dog has lost interest in the fetch and will not return with the stick. And we still don't know who the “us” is.

Here is another poem that I would say is not great but is nevertheless worth considering.

Why I Am Happy by William Stafford

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

When I read this poem the first time, I was disappointed. I couldn't understand how a poet who had been writing and publishing for so many years could write something as simple and bland as this. In that reading, I didn't consider that Stafford may be using metaphor here. Perhaps the lake is an attitude. Whatever the case, the speaker of the poem seems satisfied in her knowledge and is not interested in telling where the lake is. Whatever the 'now' is, it is enough.

These poems seem to me to have in common the idea that any life will do and that what matters is love of self or at least respect of self. Speaking of self-love, it occurs to me now that self-love could be Aristotle's “prime mover.”

And now I come to Derek Walcott's poem “Love After Love:”

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

William Stafford

One of my favorite poets is William Stafford. Among other things, he is remembered for writing a poem every day. He did another difficult thing when he was in his mid twenties. At that time he was expected to enlist and serve his country in one of the armed forces. He refused. During WWII he served time as a Conscientious Objector. That has always impressed me. That war was probably the most popular war in our history. Popular in the sense of having a lot of patriotic support. More popular even than the Revolutionary and Civil wars. That was a time of rationing fuel and food. And Stafford said no.

He refused because he was unwilling to kill or to participate where others were killing. He had to know at the time that the rest of his life would be lived in the shadow so to speak of that decision. But he was never loud about protesting war or anything else. He quietly went about his life pursuing what interested him: his wife and kids, teaching in Oregon, writing poetry and generally participating in the poetry community. In the early 1970s he served as Consultant to the Library of Congress. That position was later renamed to Poet Laureate. There are some quotes attributed to him that I remember:

• "War is failure of imagination."
• "Poetry is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."
• "Justice will take a million intricate adjustments."

The second one I remember because it surprises me. Stafford's method as a writer is to be alive to the moment, to be attentive to the impulses of the language as it delivers words to him while he is seated quietly with paper in front of him and pen in hand. I can see what he means though because we live in the world of work, of running errands, buying groceries, sleeping, kissing, eating, etc. We can be alive to the work of writing a poem, but that does not require us to live in language or poetry. Still, when I read a poem like "Biography," it's hard for me to see how Stafford separates his life from poetry.
Biography
Two days were walking down the street,
one bright, one dark, and both my birthday,
glowing for my head. (Dark is delight for
me. Both my parents are dead.) That street
was the one we lived on, years ago - that is,
while they lived.
Two days left that place; after my birth
nobody saw two days together ever again,
my mother said; and my father said the same,
but they always liked both kinds and welcomed
dark and light; both glowed for their head,
while they lived.
The house they knew has opened;
it stands at large in the hills; its
door is the rain; its window, evening.
Today I bend for roof, have shelter
when it's cold, but that great house
arches for all, everywhere, for them, too,
while I live.
From The Way It Is, Graywolf Press, 1998 p. 183.

Stafford seems to be disclosing some very personal, even private information. I think there's more to it than that: he has made himself transparent, enabling me as reader to "see" his mother and father through him and to learn something about their family. He is (as poet) alive to the memory without sentimentality, and he is alive to the writing without living in poetry. When I first read it, I thought he was putting himself in the poem. After rereading it and thinking some more though, it seems more likely that he is telling me as a reader about himself and his parents, and he is honoring them by talking about them and the house in the manner that he does. Clearly the speaker of the poem is sharing a memory: until the third stanza, the verbs are all in the past tense. Then the poem turns, and the final lines give us the speaker's current relationship to the house he used to live in with his mother and father, as well as the relationship of the house to the rest of the world. As long as he lives, that house "arches for all, everywhere, for them, too..." With the last line, the speaker enters the poem. We aren't given information about the future of the house other than to know its availability as long as the speaker of the poem lives. That's where I get some confusion as to whether Stafford is living in poetry or not. Perhaps he is being a conscientious participant in his memory, his life and his future as a poet. He may have made an intricate adjustment there that I haven't seen yet.

from Michelle Jan 5, 2008:

Andy--thanks for the reminder! I am sorry that I forgot about the William Stafford reading--I especially wanted to be there because of his Hutchinson, KS connection, a town where I lived for a year & a half!

...

I will try to get these dates in my planner so that I can join you for the upcoming readings. Thanks again for organizing this really unique and great space to meet with people who love words.

Michelle Scobie
(was at Blake reading and at Patricia McNair event)

Amazing! At last Wednesday's William Stafford event, 98.8% of the people who get the e-mail blast did NOT show up! Tim Hogan, Marion Tincknell, and I didn't mind though. Tim and I were there a little before seven and secured our location in the bookstore along with a few folding chairs. Marion joined us, and we talked until the store closed at 10 p.m. We would have stayed later if the store was open longer. Mary Oliver and Linda Pastan came up in our discussion of Stafford's poems. And I was able to share with them that Helen Ruggieri studied with Stafford in Florida in 1985. This is the year Marion is going to get her book of poems published. And Tim is writing more poems.

"It is our goal to appreciate and improve our talents, to share our own work and to communicate the joys of poetry with others. Everyone's poetry is valued." River Junction Poets Mission Statement